09/01/2026
Thoughts on this message from Ebony Magazine. What do you think?
There’s a troubling contradiction unfolding in publishing:
AI is learning from human-written books while Black authors are increasingly having to defend whether their own words are actually theirs.
As AI companies acquire and digitize books to train their models, Black writers have faced publishing deals disrupted by accusations of AI use, even as detection tools remain imperfect. It raises bigger questions about who gets to own their voice, whose work becomes training data, and what happens when technology learns to mimic stories rooted in lived experience.
Jerry Falade lost a more than $2 million deal with Minotaur for his crime novel Call Me, I’ll Hide the Body, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. No concrete proof of AI use was established in any of these cases. The detection tool used against Daggermouth was an AI tool called Pangram, which produced a 60% score for suspected AI use.
What does the rise of AI mean for the future of Black storytelling? Read more at the link in the comments.
